our association’s website serves is an online hub where members can learn about your offerings, join your community, and access benefits. As such, members are likely to spend a lot of time on your website, and its design should facilitate a smooth, intuitive experience.

On average, websites last two years and one month before getting redesigned. Usually, these changes are brought on by feeling like the current design is out of date, but it’s also common to refresh a site if performance is poor, content is outdated, or the interface isn’t user-friendly.

If you’re looking to improve engagement, earn new members, or refresh your design, this guide is here to inspire you. We’ll explore top association websites, explain why their designs work, and share how you can emulate their success.

10 Best Association Websites

1. Express Carriers Association

The Express Carriers Association (ECA) caters to shippers, carriers, and vendors, and each of these audiences needs unique benefits from a membership program. ECA understands this and creates intuitive pathways for each audience, allowing visitors to find relevant information with a single click on the homepage.

Takeaway: 

Consider your member audiences. Do you have more than one, and if so, what unique information do they need access to? This also applies to visitors other than members, such as corporate sponsors.

Adjust your menus to cater to various audiences so everyone who lands on your homepage can easily find the information they need. For example, you might create navigation labels that list specific audiences rather than features.

2. American Association of Physics Teachers

The American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) offers many benefits on its website, including program information, academic publications, event registration, and online community access.

To stay organized, AAPT leverages image CTAs across its entire site. Visitors can hover over image tiles to get detailed explanations of AAPT’s various offerings, then click to visit the corresponding information page. This helps the site stay visually appealing while also creating an intuitive user experience.

Takeaway: 

You likely have a lot of important information you want to share with your visitors. Avoid cluttering your homepage by creating CTAs that link visitors to separate detailed pages where you can discuss your offerings in depth.

3. IEEE Power Electronics Society

Associations with busy schedules need to decide how they’ll present that information to members. The IEEE Power Electronics Society (IEEE PELS) has a prominent “What’s Happening” section on its homepage, where members can find information about upcoming events, webinars, and news items. Navigating to the event page, members can find a complete calendar of events, webinars, and registration deadlines.

Takeaway: 

Promoting events should be one of your association’s top priorities, and a comprehensive calendar enables your members to check upcoming events at a glance. Consider adding a subscription feature like IEEE PELS’, where members can import your association’s calendar information straight to their personal Google Calendar, iCalendar, or Outlook platform.

4. Financial Services Professionals

Sponsorships bring in vital revenue, and strategic sponsorships provide genuinely valuable sales opportunities to members. Financial Services Professionals (FSP) makes it easy for sponsors to connect with their association with a clearly labeled “sponsorship” menu item.

From there, sponsors are provided with an overview of FSP’s goals to ensure their strategic objectives are aligned. Scrolling down, sponsors can find detailed sponsorship tiers and examples of top businesses at each sponsorship level.

Takeaway: 

Earning sponsorships can significantly expand your association’s ability to grow and provide quality content. Ensure your website starts these relationships off on the right foot by clearly explaining what your association has to offer and creating a standardized sponsorship tier system.

5. International WAGR Syndrome Association

In addition to recruiting members, your website should also be an educational hub. The International WAGR Syndrome Association (IWSA) aims to help families, physicians, and researchers understand this rare genetic disorder. To achieve this, it presents technical information about WAGR in a professional but accessible manner.

IWSA’s homepage breaks down the WAGR acronym with large, visually appealing, animated buttons. Clicking on these buttons brings visitors to pages with detailed scientific information about the various symptoms of WAGR syndrome, complete with comprehensive visuals, accessible explanations of medical terms, and video resources.

Takeaway: 

Even if your core audience is likely highly familiar with your subject matter, your educational content should still be accessible by limiting jargon, presenting content in a straightforward manner, and breaking up large blocks of text with headings and images.

6. Online News Association

Many people join trade and professional associations specifically to seek employment opportunities. Organizations like the Online News Association help their members by providing user-friendly job boards.

The Online News Association job board allows users to find jobs based on experience level, job type, and location with a clickable map. To further help job seekers, members can set up job alerts when new opportunities get posted and are invited to upload their resumes so recruiters can connect with individuals matching their companies’ needs.

Takeaway: 

Trade and professional associations should consider maintaining a job board for their members. Form partnerships with top employers in your field to provide your members with valuable, relevant opportunities.

7. Brick Development Association

Your website is a recruitment tool, but it should still be useful to members even if you’ve reached near-market capacity. For example, nearly all UK brick manufacturers are already members of the Brick Development Association (BDA).

To keep this membership engaged, the BDA’s website is home to several resources that provide a mix of entertainment (the Brick Bulletin featuring informative breakdowns of notable brick structures) and training resources to help new members get excited about brickwork and understand how to get started in this field.

Takeaway: 

Reaching the maximum number of members your association theoretically available to recruit is cause for celebration, but it also means you’ll need to keep your offerings high-quality to maintain that membership base. Gear your website toward acknowledging your members’ accomplishments, explaining your association’s value, and providing ongoing benefits.

8. International Aerospace Quality Group

Visitors will form a first impression of your association almost immediately upon arriving on your website’s homepage. The International Aerospace Quality Group (IAQG) is aware of this and greets visitors with an animated image carousel of eye-catching, branded images that represent the IAQG’s mission.

Takeaway: 

For the above-the-fold section of your homepage, consider not just what information you want to present visitors with but what visuals will grab their attention. Feature a bold, uncluttered hero image that represents your mission with a short description of your association. This will grab visitors’ eyes, enable you to create a branded experience, and present your association professionally.

9. American Massage Therapy Association

How to join your association and the benefits of membership should be as clear as possible. The American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA) provides a strong example of this with its “Join” page.

AMTA’s three tiers are listed side-by-side with information on each package’s price, length of membership, and benefits. Members can also find detailed information on eligibility criteria for each tier and the necessary steps for maintaining their membership. For example, members enrolled as professionals must continue practicing their profession.

Takeaway: 

If you offer membership tiers, ensure members can compare them with ease. This reduces confusion over each tier’s offerings and allows individuals to choose the membership package that best fits their needs.

10. Entertainment Software Association

Keeping members up-to-date on the latest trends in your industry is essential, and associations like the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) make this information easy to find.

Scrolling down the ESA’s homepage, visitors can find recent news items and opinion pieces on topics relevant to the ESA’s members. Additionally, the very first menu item on ESA’s navigation is “Policy Priorities,” which explains the ESA’s values and topics it empowers members to help shape.

Takeaway: 

Ensure members understand not just the immediate benefits they can receive from joining your association but also your association’s overall goals. For example, your association may focus on shaping policies in your industry, providing a networking hub for professionals, or offering educational resources. When prospective members understand your association’s purpose, they can better assess whether a membership is right for them.

Association Website Design Tips

Invest in an association-specific website builder.

While some large associations may prefer to work with a custom website developer, those managing small and growing associations can stay on budget and build professional websites with a website builder.

Every website builder vendor provides a unique range of themes and content modules. When building your association’s website, look for a service that caters specifically to associations, like Tradewing.

With Tradewing’s website builder, your association will receive the following:

• Drag-and-drop editor. Arrange your content how you want it with no coding knowledge required. Simply add content and customize your website interface in just a few clicks.
• Mobile optimization. Your members are busy people, and many of them will likely check in on your association via their phones. Rest assured that all of your content is accessible, no matter what device your members use thanks to Tradewing’s mobile responsiveness.
• Public and member-only page options. The key to any association website is determining what content will be available to the general public and what should be locked behind your member portal. Easily designate who can access each page.

Tradewing is intuitive for all users, regardless of their coding abilities or web design know-how. This means any association can get its website up and running in minutes, thanks to Tradewing.

Implement search engine optimization best practices.

Your website is only valuable if prospective members can find it. To improve your association’s reach, try implementing search engine optimization (SEO) strategies. Every search engine uses different factors to determine how valuable content is, and SEO best practices help organizations develop content that search engines are likely to rank highly. Subsequently, if your content ranks well for search queries related to your association, you are likely to earn more members.

To improve your association’s reach, try these SEO best practices:

• Identify high-value keywords. Determine what search queries prospective members are likely searching for when researching associations. Choose keywords with low competition and reasonable search volume, so your association’s website can easily rank highly for terms with an audience.
• Incorporate keywords into content strategically. Ultimately, search engines want to rank original, unique, and high-quality content. However, you can also help search engines determine what your content is about by strategically adding keywords to your headers and throughout body text.

• Improve load times. Pages that load quickly rank well on search engines, have lower bounce, and experience higher conversion rates. Improve your website’s speed by reducing unnecessary Javascript, implementing lazy loading, and reducing image file sizes.

Content created for SEO marketing purposes should also be valuable to your members in general. After all, maintaining a blog or news feed provides members with educational content and insights into industry developments. Continue producing this high-quality content but with an eye toward its keyword rankings and SEO potential.

Prioritize user experience.

Your website’s value is determined both by its content and how that content is displayed. A strong user experience encourages visitors to spend more time on your website, explore your content, and potentially convert.

A few ways you can create a positive user experience include:

• Intuitive navigation. Visitors should be able to find what they’re looking for on your website with ease. Consider what content you link to in your navigation and create clear labels. For example, for your membership sign-up page, would a label that says “Get Involved” or “Membership” be more intuitive to your members?
• Accessible content. Your content should be accessible to your entire audience. Add alternative text to images, provide closed captions and scripts for videos, and make language accessible by limiting jargon and providing definitions for technical terms.
• Audience pathways. If you have multiple audiences, create user pathways for them. For example, you will likely want to create pathways for prospective members and sponsors. These separate audiences should see content labels that clearly address their unique needs so they can navigate to content relevant to them.

Additionally, consider adding an online community page. An online community enables your members to connect with one another online, improving their networking potential and providing your association’s members with more benefits.

Ensure member privacy.

Publicly available content on your website enables you to entice new members. However, certain content should be locked to members only. This not only drives member registrations but also protects your members’ privacy.

For example, many associations make all or parts of their membership directory private. For example, you might display members’ names and profile pictures but not their email addresses and phone numbers.

Provide members with self-service management tools so they can adjust their privacy settings at their own discretion.

Feature all association fundamentals.

Ultimately, your website should include all the features and functionalities your members need. This will vary from association to association, but in general, the fundamental website elements for trade and professional associations include:

• Registration page. Ensure members can easily find your sign-up page, which should include include a short membership registration form, any membership requirements, and payment information.
• Member benefits. Provide a clear value proposition about what members can gain from joining your association. If you have multiple membership tiers, ensure members can easily compare them to choose the tier that best suits their needs, interests, and professional level.
• Member directory. Allow members to connect with one another through a membership directory. However, you may choose to put all or certain elements of this feature behind your membership login to protect members’ privacy.
• Job board. Trade and professional associations can help job seekers and recruiters in their industry find each other by hosting job boards. Additionally, unlike job postings on general websites like LinkedIn, your members can feel confident all opportunities listed on your website are legitimate offers from reputable employers.
• Event calendar. Make getting involved easy by maintaining an accessible event calendar. You may also host events on your website, which requires a dedicated hosting page behind your member portal.
• News feed or blog. Help your members stay in the loop about recent developments in your industry by regularly posting educational content and news reports. Maintaining a blog can also improve your website’s SEO performance by showing search engines that your website is active and filled with new, valuable content.
• Sponsor information. Start conversations with sponsors by providing details about what they can gain from working with your association and how they can contact your team to start a conversation.

Depending on your association, you might also have prominent pages for your online marketplace, publications, or credentials information. When creating your navigation menu, be conscious of your members’ needs and prioritize pages most relevant to their interests.

More Association Website and Technology Resources

Your website is the face of your organization, and the best association websites bring in new members, facilitate the member experience, and showcase their organization’s brand. Apply the strategies in this guide to elevate your website and grow your association.

Of course, your website is just one part of your association’s technology stack. For more technology resources, check out these guides:

• Member Engagement Platform: Getting More out of Memberships. Elevate the member experience with a dedicated member engagement platform. Learn what these tools can do for your association.
• Association Management Software: 20 Top AMS Vendors. Your association management software works alongside your website to create a top membership experience. Explore these top vendors to find the right AMS for your organization.
• How To Find The Right Association Event Management Software. Events are essential for providing members with valuable experience. Discover top tools for hosting events right on your website.